The honest in-flight announcements

Your life-jacket can be found under your seat, but please do not remove it now. In fact, do not bother to look for it at all. In the event of a landing on water, an unprecedented miracle will have occurred, because in the history of aviation the number of wide-bodied aircraft that have made successful landings on water is zero. This aircraft is equipped with inflatable slides that detach to form life rafts, not that it makes any difference. Please remove high-heeled shoes before using the slides. We might as well add that space helmets and anti-gravity belts should also be removed, since even to mention the use of the slides as rafts is to enter the realm of science fiction.

This was written in 2006, before Captain Sullenberger’s miracle on the Hudson, so I checked in on Wikipedia‘s page about water landings, on which they refer to his plane as an “Airbus A320 narrow-body jet”. So I guess that leaves the above statistic intact. Back in 1999, after JFK Jr. died, Slate‘s Explainer column reported that there had “never been a single ditching by a U.S.-flag commercial airline”, while there had been several non-U.S. ditchings. You can read about those on Wikipedia as well.